“It’s Our Education”: The AI Debate at Warren Wilson
Clara Shirley | Feb. 3, 2026
On Friday, Jan. 23, amidst the hurried preparations across campus for severe icy weather, Warren Wilson College (WWC) hosted the Western North Carolina (WNC) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Educator’s Exchange in Canon Lounge. This summit brought together educators from across the region, including librarians, professors, media and IT specialists, department chairs, deans and health coordinators. While targeted mainly at higher education professionals, representatives from Buncombe County’s K-12 institutions were also present. Organized by WWC’s Director of IT Mars Landis, introduced by Provost Jay Roberts and led by former Utah Commissioner of Higher Education Bill Sederburg, the summit sought to address concerns about student AI use, integrating AI into classrooms and curricula and its use by administrators.
Roberts began the summit with a speech about place-based colleges, refuting a quote by Bill Gates to emphasize the need for colleges and universities to be responsible and responsive to their spaces. Roberts then introduced the idea of the importance of “slow knowledge,” which was referenced several times during the almost five-hour summit. This term, coined by environmental scholar David Orr, is the antithesis of “fast knowledge,” which Orr says is the rapid acquisition of homogenized knowledge that can lead to detrimental effects within communities and cultures.
With a continuous emphasis on the fact that AI is everywhere – in cars, Google and virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa – speakers highlighted the importance of shifting educational mindsets to navigate AI use while addressing the challenge of maintaining academic integrity. AI use and cheating among college students was one of the main concerns for attendees of the summit, and educators wanted to know how they could incorporate AI into their classrooms and support these students instead of giving them a failing grade. The consensus among members of the summit was that AI is a complex tool, neither good nor bad, and that AI use and transparency should be an ongoing conversation between students and faculty.
Only one student was directly involved in the discussion. Mahalla Hynes, a junior at WWC, attended the summit as a representative of the Writing Studio Crew. Hynes said that, while it was understandable to want to begin the conversation around AI in an educational setting solely with faculty members, doing so eliminates the voices of students, who tend to see AI in a more negative light.
“We don't have to have a meeting [where we] only hear faculty opinions, because that sends the message that we're not interested in student opinions,” Hynes said. “I hope that's not the opinion of Wilson, but I haven't really seen a lot of efforts from real administration to see student voices.”
To combat the perceived exclusion of students from the summit, WWC junior Gabe Ranke compiled a pamphlet of anonymous AI opinions from over 50 students, highlighting issues of ethical use, environmental issues and intersections with racism and classism. Ranke also emphasized the personal connections many students have to AI, including living near data centers that have a negative impact on their lives. Ranke left copies of this pamphlet outside of Canon Lounge, and all of them were taken and discussed by attendees.
“It just felt like the whole ethos of the event was very disconnected from student voice and student input,” Ranke said. “I wanted that to be present there, even if people couldn't physically be present because of classes or evacuation [from the inclement winter weather].”
Several programs were introduced at the summit, with a common goal of raising awareness about AI and how it can be used. Western Carolina University’s (WCU) Jonathan Wade led a discussion about an AI education program for teachers, which follows the “Five E” model to Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate AI technologies for educators to feel more comfortable navigating AI use in the classroom. Blue Ridge Community College (BRCC) CIO Steve Young introduced the “BrAIn Hub Community Competition”, which will be open to all students enrolled in a WNC higher education program. This is a chance for students to use AI to address a community issue, and details on the program will likely be coming later this spring.
Each of the schools represented at the summit shared how AI is understood and approached at their institution. All schools agreed that an AI statement about the appropriateness of its use in the classroom is imperative for professors to include in their syllabi if they have objections, as there are not generally institution-wide AI policies in place. In some schools, including WCU and WWC, educators and faculty use AI in their personal research.
Many institutional representatives commented on the curricular integration of AI in business and communications classes as well as senior capstones, and at Asheville-Buncombe Technical College (AB Tech), students can pursue an Associate of Applied Science degree in AI Technology. BRCC also uses Ovation VR in public speaking classes, which offers real-time speaking support as well as simulated meetings where students can practice their skills. At Mars Hill University, the use of chatbots as teaching assistants (TAs) and the use of AI to assist in designing textbooks are commonplace.
Some institutions, like Brevard College, offer institution-wide access to ChatGPT for faculty, as well as access to Gemini and NotebookLM for all students. Brevard College specifically is interested in how AI can enhance experiential learning and continue the student engagement loop. Other institutions, like BRCC, use Element451 to streamline administrative processes, including student services, college recruitment and registrar support, as live personnel cannot be available to help students 24/7.
Many colleges, like AB Tech, acknowledge that AI is a non-neutral tool that cannot substitute humans. Still, institutions have found that using chatbots can be cheaper, at both the teaching and administrative levels, and educators have seen their roles shift from doing hands-on work to supporting roles within AI technology.
Dr. Laura B. Leatherwood, the president of BRCC, emphasized that AI can be a career pathway and is a crucial tool for round-the-clock academic advising and access to mental health resources, though she stressed no chatbot is being used to administer any mental health services, such as counseling. This was a concern for several individuals at the summit, as chatbots used in lieu of professional counselors have been linked to several suicides.
In response to concerns about the financial aspect of using chatbots for such extensive administrative purposes, Leatherwood assured the summit that administrators felt the cost of investing in AI was akin to the cost of investing in real people. She expressed the belief that a chatbot can often fulfill the needs of a program for the same cost as hiring a trained individual.
There were concerns among some attendees about AI hallucinations (the process by which AI chatbots make up information and sources) but administrators were confident that any chatbots used would be specifically trained to provide students with information directly and solely from an institution’s website. The move to AI for administrative processes was justified by the claim that students today do not have the attention span for more than two clicks on a website.
At the end of the summit, educators spoke about what they had heard over the course of the meeting, including the student opinion pamphlets left outside Canon Lounge. In a breakout setting, groups discussed the advantages of AI such as the ability to generate summaries of course material and the usefulness of AI review tools, as well as the concerns they had regarding ethical use and environmental impact. In discussing the use of AI, many felt that it was useful and appropriate for tasks such as writing lab reports, but not for writing assignments in a communications class.
While each school has unique approaches to the use of AI, they all appear to be moving steadily to board the “train”, as Landis put it. This is a concern for WWC students, who expressed their worries in Ranke’s pamphlet and on the WWC App Replacement Google Chat. Though the apprehension towards AI integration was acknowledged by the summit, representatives from the institutions present felt a strong need to keep up with evolving technology.
“One of the realities that we're facing is that these technologies are somewhat inescapable for our society,” Landis said. “That ship has already sailed, and there's nothing we can do to change that. The question now for us is what power do we have to enable our students to be agents of change and direction in this new world order.”
While AI is only becoming more present in our society, individuals and institutions still have a say in when and how it is used, if at all. Professor of Environmental Policy and Associate Academic Dean Amy Knisley had a different perspective on the use of AI in an educational setting, specifically its possible instructional use.
“To say that [AI is] an inevitability in the teaching and learning setting is false, and I don't buy into that at all,” Knisley said. “I think it's really problematic, because right there in the name, it's an artificial intelligence. Our whole endeavor in liberal arts and sciences is about human intelligence. That's really at the core of what we're doing.”
Landis discussed his efforts to find a grant to fund a solar-powered data center in the Bannerman building because of its redundant power and air cooling, a system that would allow a data center to maintain an optimal temperature while minimizing connectivity disruptions. This project would allow WWC to have a net-zero energy use source of AI technology. While Landis does not anticipate WWC using AI for instructional purposes, he emphasized the importance of integrating knowledge about AI and AI preparedness into the college.
“How do we ensure that our experience in education is actually experiential?” Landis said. “At the same time, we have to be cognizant of the fact that if we don't use these technologies at all, and if we don't teach our students how to live and work in a society and culture that has these technologies embedded into almost everything we do, then we're doing our students a disservice.”
“All of us do think about [student] futures, the futures of our graduates,” Knisley said. “We do have a responsibility to have awareness about what [AI] is and how it's affecting people's potential future careers.”
While an on-campus data center would prevent WWC from relying on outsourcing its AI use, and using solar energy would mitigate some of the main environmental concerns that come with larger corporate models, the construction of data centers in general is controversial. Knisley offered that, aside from the waste products generated, there is the question of motivation. Who benefits from these AI data centers?
“It's those who are inventing it, those who are invested in it, those who have something to gain from deploying these AI models, and anytime there's environmental cost that's being borne by everybody,” Knisley said. “At the moment, it's not clear who's benefiting.”
While WWC seeks to keep up with the broader society in terms of technology and streamlined, cost-effective services, students remain vocal about their unease surrounding the integration of AI technology into their school experience.
“It's really weird how AI is being perceived, and I think that tells me really negative things about the future of it,” Ranke said. “I haven't seen any way that that is positively impacting students or teachers.”
Landis, along with many other summit attendees, expressed their gratitude to the students involved in Ranke’s pamphlet at the end of the summit. They agreed that student voices are imperative in such a divisive conversation and applauded the student body’s efforts in making their opinions heard. Knisley emphasized the importance of self-advocacy, expressing how influential student demonstrations and platforms like the Student Government Association (SGA) and The Echo Newspaper are.
“With technological innovation, there can be this prevailing discourse that says, ‘this is inevitable, plus it's also great, get your head out of the stand and quit being a Luddite and quit being a naysayer,’” Knisley said. “It's this kind of discourse that preemptively de-legitimizes [alternative] point[s] of view. That's a lie, in my view. If you are present in the system, if you're a stakeholder, you're the literal learner, right? [If] you're what the work of the college revolves around, then your voice actually has enormous import.”
As conversations about AI move forward, it is important to stay up to date on its advancement and to continue to look at both the benefits and drawbacks to its integration in educational settings. When discussing a topic as broad and divisive as AI, especially in educational settings, it is imperative that all voices are heard. While the AI Educator’s Exchange was a productive conversation among decision makers, the consensus was that student voices were an essential missing link. Another AI conference is scheduled for June, which, according to Sederburg, may be more open to students.